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PARENTHOOD AND THE PALM PILOT

By David Menconi

During our pre-parenthood years, my wife and I swore we'd never drive a minivan, own a cell phone, or use a Palm Pilot. Obviously, we were naive about the demands of three children, including twins.

The first hurdle that fell was the minivan because it was the only vehicle big enough to accommodate everybody. The twins' arrival required knowing everybody's whereabouts, and so we got a second phone number-the cell phone. And finally, as we felt the last vestiges of our sleep-deprived minds slipping away, my wife surrendered and got a Palm Pilot, too.

But as we say in our household, parenthood means never having to apologize for your memory death. Besides, technology is supposed to be your friend, and the Palm Pilot is probably the most practical 250 bucks we ever spent.

Before the Palm Pilot, my wife lugged a bulky Franklin planner from her pre-parenthood days and tried to keep up with a half-dozen paper lists: shopping lists, to-do lists, gift lists, questions-to-ask-various-doctors lists. The Palm Pilot compressed all that information into a lightweight, three-by-five-inch note card size device that easily fits into a purse or pocket.

A Palm Pilot is the perfect parental accessory. It relieves you of the tedious responsibility to track the never-ending details that you're too frazzled to remember anyway. It's a calendar, address book, to-do list and reminder service rolled into one. Record a regular appointment once and it will repeat as often as you want. And with the aural alarm feature, you can use it as an alarm clock (as if any parent of a newborn needs an alarm clock).

On the downside, about once a month our Palm Pilot acts up and as my wife says, "has a nervous breakdown." But you can prevent this tantrum by rebooting it on the computer. Back up and save the Palm Pilot's data frequently. Daily is best, if you can remember to do it that often. Fortunately, you can program your Palm Pilot to remind you of this task, too.

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